Armenia PM arrives in Turkey for ‘historic’ visit

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan arrived in İstanbul on Friday for a rare visit to Turkey, a country with which Armenia has no diplomatic relations, in what Yerevan has described as a “historic” step toward regional peace.

Armenia and Turkey have never established official diplomatic ties, and their shared land border has remained closed since the 1990s.

“Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has arrived in Turkey on a working visit,” his spokeswoman Nazeli Baghdasaryan said in a post on Facebook.

The trip comes at the invitation of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The two leaders are scheduled to meet at Dolmabahçe Palace in İstanbul at 15:00 GMT, according to a statement from the Turkish presidency.

Ties between the two countries have long been strained, primarily over the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire — atrocities that Yerevan classifies as genocide. Turkey disputes the designation.

Ankara has also consistently supported Azerbaijan, its close ally and a fellow Turkic-language-speaking nation, in its decades-long conflict with Armenia.

“This is a historic visit, as it will be the first time a head of the Republic of Armenia visits Turkey at this level. All regional issues will be discussed,” Armenian National Assembly Speaker Alen Simonyan told reporters.

“The risks of war [with Azerbaijan] are currently minimal, and we must work to neutralize them. Pashinyan’s visit to Turkey is a step in that direction.”

An official from the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Agence France-Presse that the meeting would cover efforts to finalize a comprehensive peace agreement as well as the broader regional consequences of the ongoing conflict between Iran and Israel.

On Thursday Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met with Erdoğan in Turkey and praised the Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance as “a significant factor, not only regionally but also globally.”

Erdoğan reiterated his support for “the establishment of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia.”

Baku and Yerevan reached a draft agreement on a peace treaty in March. However, Azerbaijan has since introduced new conditions — including demands for constitutional changes in Armenia — before it will sign the accord.

Normalization

Pashinyan has been pursuing normalization efforts with both Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Earlier this year, he announced that Armenia would suspend its international campaign to gain recognition of the 1915 mass killings as genocide — a major gesture toward Turkey that provoked criticism domestically.

This is Pashinyan’s second visit to Turkey. He previously attended Erdoğan’s presidential inauguration in 2023 and was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate him on his re-election.

In 2021 Ankara and Yerevan appointed special envoys to oversee a normalization dialogue, one year after Armenia’s military defeat to Azerbaijan in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war.

The following year, Turkey and Armenia resumed commercial flights after a two-year suspension.

A previous effort to normalize relations — the 2009 Zurich Protocols to open the border — was never ratified by the Armenian parliament and was officially abandoned in 2018.

© Agence France-Presse